Social media, including the all-important Facebook profile photo, is playing a bigger role in this election than ever before. Facebook/Barack Obama, Facebook/Mitt Romney

October 22, 2012

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In this razor-close battle for the presidency, the rival campaigns are fighting for every undecided voter, making record numbers of phone calls and door-to-door visits, but "a new front has opened in the 2012 election: the #hashtagwar," says Julianna Goldman at Bloomberg News. Last week during a Virginia campaign stop, for example, President Obama said that Mitt Romney was conveniently forgetting conservative policies and adopting moderate ones because he was suffering from "Romnesia." Within 24 hours, #Romnesia was trending worldwide on Twitter, and Obama's stump speech was suddenly big news. So new is the phenomenon that nobody knows how much such viral successes will matter on election day, Harvard professor Nicco Mele, who studies social media in politics, tells Bloomberg News, but so far "Obama is operating at a different order of magnitude than Romney just in terms of raw numbers." How does Obama's social-media impact differ from Romney's? Here's a breakdown, by the numbers: